In this episode

Real Estate Isn’t Just Easy Mailbox Money—Here’s Why

If you think investing in real estate is just easy mailbox money, here’s a wake-up call: sometimes property managers don’t even turn on the heat in the dead of an Iowa winter.

But that’s not the biggest shock—because the real risks are the ones you never see coming, like hidden repair bills or shady ‘expert’ advice that can sink your first deal overnight.

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In today’s episode of The Hybrid Real Estate Professional Podcast, we’re breaking down how to:

• 🚫 Dodge common pitfalls
• 🏠 Scale your rental portfolio—even with a full-time W-2 job and three kids
• 🧠 Keep your sanity while managing it all

Tune in now to learn the exact systems we use for:

• 🌍 Managing remote properties
• 🏢 Managing property managers
• 💸 Protecting your cash flow before disaster strikes

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Connect with Martin:

• 📸 Instagram: @mabeechen

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Follow The Hybrid Real Estate Professional Podcast on:

• 🎧 Spotify: Link
• 🍏 Apple Podcasts: Link

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If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a 5-star review. Your support helps me grow this podcast and reach more listeners like you!

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risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything I stopped making as many mistakes when I put
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myself in rooms around other people who if I just started this 20 to 25 years
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ago I would be in such a different place right now if I just kept at it there’s a lot of people that start following
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advice on YouTube and there’s a lot of really I I don’t want to call it bad advice but
0:23
it’s just not good advice for people that are starting out people just get excited because they’re watching these
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like shiny objects on social media and they assume like oh that’s the thing I can go mimic that and it’s just not a
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good way to do it welcome back to the hybrid real
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estate professional podcast the podcast where we help you grow your own portfolio of cash flowing rentals that
0:45
you can manage in only 20 minutes a day from anywhere in the country today I have a special episode that I recorded
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in an X space with my friend Martin beIN we talked about our advice to investors
0:58
who are looking to start out and we gave both of our experience in some of the best steps that we think investors can take if they’re looking to
1:05
buy their first rle without further Ado let’s get into [Music]
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it I’ll start by asking you the first question like how did you how did you get started in real estate take me you
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take me to the story sure thing well thanks for setting this up yeah my name is Aaron Amin I
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live in Houston Texas I’m a father of three kids under the age of three and a
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by day I work as a Management Consultant a full-time 9 to-5 job and by night I
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have my wife and I have built a portfolio of eight single family rental properties across three states our
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closest rental is a thousand miles away in an area called the Quad Cities in Iowa and our furthest is in Washington
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state in central Washington we also have three in Las Vegas so we started as
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local investors when we were living you’re doing that across all those States yep yeah we
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it started organically as kind of investing in our backyard when we lived in Las Vegas and as we we moved across
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the country a couple times we kept the houses that we had bought so we became long-distance investors kind of
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organically and now that’s our whole shtick oh that makes a little more sense so you you kind of just picked them up
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as you were living in a given area and that’s why they’re so spread out yeah that’s part of the story so we never lived in Iowa but we I grew up in
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Washington state and we lived in Las Vegas for 5 years and that was where we started investing was in Las Vegas and
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then when we moved to Washington we held all four properties in Las Vegas and then when we moved to Texas we held the
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two that we picked up in Washington so it was definitely part of the part of the story that’s pretty crazy and so you
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said you’re up to eight now yes across three states wow that’s more than enough to keep you busy especially if you’re
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working fulltime and three kids under three that’s nuts I just I can just feel my stress level rising thinking about
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that yeah definitely it takes a p on your sleep that’s for sure and you got
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you got to fight for to keep your physical health in line too with all those different balls in the air but oh
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yeah for sure yeah like keeping your head in a and keeping your mental health in place and also your physical health is huge it’s like so important yeah if
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you start you just get into those kind of dark periods where like you know like just like that month where everything goes wrong yeah definitely suddenly it
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ends up being a lot more important yeah now for sure I understand well give us a quick background on yourself as well
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yeah no for sure so my name is Martin be and I split my time between Eastern Washington and and like the the Phoenix
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area Phoenix is kind of a newer thing for us so we were primarily up in Washington before but I’m trying to do more and more business down here so we
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have a place down here and we kind of like come down here for the warmer weather in the winter didn’t historically do a lot with
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real estate but been investing since the90s I had a huge exit event in 2021
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for like a long-term investment and then so I was sitting on on a lot of liquidity and so it’s just initially for
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me it was we’d always kind of toyed with the idea of like hey maybe we should have a run and we had friends that were doing it and so we started with two
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single family homes just because that was pretty easy to do it was easy to get financing especially at that time too and we understood single family so we
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figured worst case scenario we could just sell them later and the more we got into it the more we liked it and so that
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was yeah that was 2021 coming out of that 2022 was kind of a weird year you know the market kind of went crazy in
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the middle of it it was really difficult to find deals and we actually closed one of those single family homes in early early
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2021 but after we got kind of the hang of things you saw what it was like doing that for you know 6 to 12 months then we
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decided to span more much more heavily into it so going into 2023 we bought 12 doors that year so it was three duplexes
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and a sixplex and then kind of coming out of that it took a long time to get all of that
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stuff settled that was like a pretty big pretty big on-ramp like I said we were pretty we had a lot of liquidity so it was it was a lot easier to get into the
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deals and do stuff like that but that was also in Eastern Washington when prices had finally kind of started to chill out a little bit after they
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started increasing rates in 2022 things went nuts in Washington kind of like they did everywhere but it was especially in the eastern half of the
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state it was really difficult to find anything so we uh kind of went on a
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buying spre once things loosened up in 2023 and then going into 2024 I would
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say we spent the most of this last year kind of getting that stabilized and then and then buying buying three more
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doors so I’m up to I’m up to 18 doors currently and that’s across seven properties and kind of along the way
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doing a little bit of like flipping and then you real like there were some lots that we bought that we’ve we’ve made a pretty good return on WE targeted early
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on and just figured hey like it’s hard to imagine us ever like selling this for less than we’re getting
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it now and yeah so it just been like the last few years in particular it’s been kind of a grind getting a lot of things
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figured out we went to it like with no idea like kind of what what we were doing so like the last two years it’s
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just been a big kind of on-ramp for us so like no one in our either of our families was doing like rentals like we had a couple friends that did it kind of
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lightly you know at the time when we would go talk to them and try to get advice it would it we they in in our mind they
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were just like absolute pros and now looking back and like man these people had no idea what they were doing you know like three four doors or something
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and but in my mind I was like man I can’t imagine having having four properties that just seemed like so much
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responsibility but now it’s now it’s a lot different I mean that was that was for
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me you know I’m still I don’t know what are you still expanding heavily or you still you still looking you still buying your stuff so what’s in I love the topic
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you chose today getting started right because I think getting started usually people have enough money or save up
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enough money for one or maybe a couple or in your case you had a big liquidity event and you had a lot of your own
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money to deploy right at some point people run out of their own money whether it’s at four doors eight doors
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or in your case 18 doors right at some point you have to start looking outside of the kind of save saving and invest
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strategy and especially with three kids our financial profile flipped upside down you we had three kids in two and a
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half years oh man from from Dual income no kids to one income three kids you
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know one W2 income I should say and and then you know started a couple side building did you say three kids in two
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and a half years yes doing them I’m doing the rough math and that’s that sounds back to
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back well we uh we Juiced our returns with the twins right oh okay I see that
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makes that makes a lot okay now that now makes a lot more sense yeah so when you ask if we’re doing some expansion I
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guess you could say we’re we’re growing our our family but not not as much acquisition on the rental Front we did
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one flip this year in 2024 and it was remote as well we worked with a team in the Quad Cities area Quad City’s
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straddles Iowa and Illinois so we this was the first property we bought in
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Illinois we bought it in May and we exited last month in November and so we
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did a flip this year our big project which is pretty unrelated from single
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family is my wife and I so she wrapped up a contract after about seven years at a nonprofit and instead of going and
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finding another W2 job full-time which would have been pretty tough on our family we she we going to start a
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business and build an assisted living home it’s we’re calling it a Memory Care
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Mansion so it’ll be a 10,000 square foot groundup development 16 bedroom 16 bath
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and it it you know this is different than a rental property this is a full on business assisted living home but it
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should more than replace any type of corporate income she was going to get plus it’ll be backed by some a very nice
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piece of real estate so that’s going to be our big harry audition goal heading into 2025 it’s going to be probably a
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three to five year project when all a said and done about two years of construction one year of stabilization
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and another couple years to run full cycle with the investors we’re gonna have to bring on but that’s kind of so
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we’re kind of concentrating a lot of our effort towards that project so you’re doing that like I mean from the ground
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up like you’re gonna buy a lot or do you already have the lot yeah so we’re narrowing in we have a lot we’ve talked
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to the sellers agent we’re getting very close on a 6.2 acre lot in Tomball Texas
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which is about 20 minutes from where we live here in the suburb of Houston that’s intense man I mean Kudos that’s a
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huge thing to bite off like especially jumping from because you said everything else is single family right yeah we we
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did pretty boring ing Straight Ahead single family long-term rentals no fancy strategies you know we did a few like
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Liv then rent so we lived in a house for a year or more and then we moved out and rented it we did we bought a couple of
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them off Market but we never did any crazy you know direct to seller we didn’t buy you know heavy heavy rehab
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properties we didn’t do any Burrs it was a lot of just saving and snowballing our own money and then operating
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longdistance rental properties so yeah this this is a new game that we’re going to into now that’s exciting though man I
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mean that’s also audacious like Kudos on on taking a taking a big risk that’s yeah I appreciate that
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intense yeah so obviously it deviates a little bit from the topic of getting started in real estate but what I’ll what I’ll tie back to there is that you
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know we would never have had the courage to take on something this big if we
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didn’t get our feet wet and kind of learn some of the basic ropes of real estate how does Real Estate work what
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are some of the tax advantages how do you think about portfolio management how do you understand leverage and all the
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financial tools out there there’s a ton of foundational skills from our you know
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now six years as rental property investors that we’re going to carry forward as we build out this you know
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much more complex business and yeah I I could not agree more yes I do think it’s
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all related and you know doing it while working a full-time job learning all the different time management elements you
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know that’s what I’m passionate about so I do coach new investors that want to get started particularly focusing on
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people who live in high cost of living areas that can’t afford to invest in their own market and so yeah I teach
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them how to you know build teams out of state find the right markets and you know set up all the systems that they
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need so they can run it on the side while working full-time and having family so this is a great for something
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yeah yeah know you like are you finding that to be lucrative uh well I mean in the sense of
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like there are definitely people that are willing to invest in coaching it’s it’s a crowded field let’s put it that
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way there’s like a bajillion buy your first rental courses and right there are people that are a lot more famous and
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popular than me so you’re competing in a crowded field with that said you know
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the whole having three young kids working full-time continuing to advance in my career and like building a
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business that doesn’t take over your life and kind of the contrarian Viewpoint of most of the programs out
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there kind of position it says how can I quit my job right you know Silver Bullet type
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situation and I you know believe that your job can be and in most cases is a
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very large asset in a portfolio of income streams that you can build over the course your lifetime so I do take a
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bit of a contrary view there where like your W2 is an asset that can help fuel your real estate investing you know in
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your 20s 30s and 40s and from there it it gets you all the optionality you could ever need for you and your family
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if you’re building those in tandems so to answer your question we you know I’ve served over we have over 60 members in
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the community we built yeah and you know we do get a stream of people that are interested in kind of that philosophy of
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how to how to build it around your lifestyle instead of letting it take over your life that’s fantastic man I
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think that’ll also make this a really interesting conversation because you you came at this from a very different place
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I think than I did in that like it sounds like well you you like you you slow SL built you kind of slowly built
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up and you built it around kind of like doing like the standard 9 to5 where I was like I’d been investing
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for a long time and then I had this huge liquidity event that freed things up for me but like that like that liquidity
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event was also okay that was where I could stop doing the N9 to-5 thing and so I came into I came into
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real estate with like almost the opposite problem that most people have when they start it you know say usually they’ll save up some and kind of get and
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then they’ll like put that in play and then they’ll just slowly expand where it was like I had more than enough liquidity to kind of buy whatever I
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needed to but I was terrified of it and so I I I I feel like I in a short
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period of time learned a lot about I spent a lot of money learning what not to do and so for me it was just kind of
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like I had like almost the opposite not the opposite experience but a very different kind of take on it and that it was just a like man you know if I had
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just started out like on my own and I don’t know like with 100K or something like that I would have completely you
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know just there were a number of times I was like man if I didn’t have all this backing and I was still doing a 9 to five job this would have train wrecked
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me and almost always that turns into a you know like a a post on X or something where I’m like whatever you do don’t do
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this or like don’t do this it’s the kiss of death like avoid this thing that’s usually because I said yes or I agreed
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to it or I tried it and then just in in doing it just realized like man if I hadn’t been so like I was I was never overleveraged
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or I just you know if I had like a mountain of debt you know bearing down on me at that point I would have freaked out yeah so are you saying that almost
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the liquidity event and the the cushion and comfort that that provided you put you in a different position where you
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kind of took you made decisions in a different way than if you were still working is that what you’re saying yeah yeah especially early on when I didn’t
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have a lot of scale like there were just it felt like I was screwing everything up in retrospect you know I wasn’t but
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it’s just like I didn’t even I I wasn’t dialed in at all in terms of like what what things look like how they work you know like early on I would freak out
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about like every little tiny expense even though I was well funded but it was just you know like it I think
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one of the places that we I remember like the second month we had it rented like I had to replace the garage door
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opener and that destroyed like you know like all of the income for that month and I’m like man this was just a loss
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like like is this not for me should I not be doing that I just did you know but at the same time I had like like
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that wasn’t where you know like all of our lifestyle income was coming from so it was just sort of like a little like
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side project that I could play with and as I did that I just thinking like man I would be prob if this was just
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everything I had I would be freaking out right now and later on you kind of realize it’s okay and and that it’s fine
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and just it’s like it’s just a capital intensive game and so I feel like like a lot of people get into it or a lot of
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the folks that I talk to they they kind of get into it with this very star-eyed optimistic like oh everything’s going to
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be fine they’re like you know wildly optimistic about the rents that they’re going to get they just assume it’s going to be rented at least 90% of the time
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you know just using these kind of standard formulas and then they get into situations and they’re just buried except it’s the livelihood on the
15:54
line not necessarily you know they just because they don’t they don’t have any buffer to so I think there’s a few
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directions we could take coming off about great great nuggets right but so
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we could go one of two paths let what’s have you pick one is like what are the steps to get started and two or what are
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the things not to do when you get started I think we’re kind of naturally going down path to already yeah yeah oh
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I think let’s let’s not go down too far that because I did I did spend some time thinking about okay if I was just you know like a lot of what I’m doing now I
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realized like if I just started this 20 to 25 years ago I would be in such a
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different place right now if I just kept at it but that’s just you know with that like that long you know
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at any given point along the way though it just seemed like just a capital intensity to get into so yeah let’s start with maybe the top like let’s say
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like top three three to five things that you know to get started and then we can get into like like mistakes to avoid
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like hacks tips tricks like you know things to things to think about yeah absolutely well you want me
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to go first or you want yeah yeah go all right so I have kind of a seven step framework and I’ll just read out the
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steps and a little bit of what each one is and we’ll see if it’s similar to what you’re thinking but as with anything any
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type of business or career objective anything in the world really in life
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starting with your why right it’s a very cliche thing you hear a lot of people talk about it but to the point you were just making earlier if you get into a
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situation and you’re having to deal with some adversity or you your cash flow gets wiped out for a couple months
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because of a big expense and you don’t you aren’t strongly rooted in why you’re doing this in the first place you are
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very prone to giving up in most in most instances right but you could zoom out
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and really understand the big picture and say hey I’m doing this to enable insert outcome here whether it’s you
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know I want to have time Freedom by the time I’m a certain age or by the time my kids are a certain age or maybe you want
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to accelerate your retirement by 10 years like whatever that transformational outcome is that you’re
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seeking that you can really embed deeply into why you’re doing it it’ll make those garage door openers and the big
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you know water heaters Replacements that come out of nowhere or feel like they come out of nowhere it’ll make you be
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able to get through those type of moments so that’s step one and I think that’s an incredibly important step step
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two identify your strategy right so I think some people get distracted right out of the gate because they get this
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idea of I’m going to buy a rental property and then they see somebody posts on Facebook that they bought a mobile home park and then then they go
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spend know two three weeks or a couple months just like binging content on YouTube about mobile home parks and then
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they see somebody doing a short-term all and then they go do that and you know next thing you know I I’m all for
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exploring and trying to understand what resonates with you but if you don’t actually pick something and get started
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and match it with that strategy and the why then you know it’s going to be really hard to do anything tactical from
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there step three pick your market and your submarket whether you want to invest in your own backyard or whether
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you want to invest across the country or maybe even in a different country obviously you got to you know pick pick
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a GE and there’s a process for that there’s a lot of kind of macroeconomic analysis you can do
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there’s so there’s quantitative stuff you can pull and there’s qualitative observations you can make even if you’re
19:16
not in that market you gather that data you you interview different teammates other investors Etc and and you make a
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decision about where you want to invest step four build your real estate investing dream team so you know we have
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kind of what we call the core five which is you know you you have your agent you have your property manager you have your
19:36
lender and you typically have some sort of contractor or maybe a handyman depending on how intense the type of
19:42
projects you do and then the fifth one which is kind of the Special Sauce especially if you’re doing remote is the
19:49
other investors in that market and I’ll share some stories maybe if we have time later on how we screwed up by not having
19:56
that fifth member the other investors it kind of acts as a check and balance because especially when you’re a remote
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if you’re just taking people’s word for what they’re doing and you don’t have any type of uh system for oversight and
20:10
and like that checks and balances it can be very very difficult and you can be taken advantage of I have learned that
20:15
the hard way which I take full accountability for but now I’m very very insistent on having that gift M step
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five Define your buy box and then use it to analyze deals every day for 90 days
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so the idea here that you build a very specific buy box and you you take all
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that market analysis data the areas that you chose to invest you take some of the knowledge and expertise from your team
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and you create what’s the perfect deal look like for me and you try and be as specific as possible so maybe you’re
20:45
looking for three bed two bath you know single story homes that are built you know after
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1985 and in these three zip codes what you know you can get as specific as you
20:58
want want as long as it’s still clear and then the exercise we usually run people through is now that you have your
21:04
buy box analyze every single deal that comes across in those parameters at
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least one a day for 90 days and if you run out of live deals then either widen in your parameters a little bit or go
21:16
rerun some deals that have recently sold just so you can get those reps in and really understand deal analysis promise
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I’m almost done with these seven steps because I want your reaction to it but step six is make offers on everything
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fits your criteria so one of the biggest kind of fallacies that I think people come across especially right now in this
21:35
High rate environment and high price environment these people run deal analysis based on the list price and
21:42
they see that it’s you know a negative $400 a month cash flow and they just move on they just accept the list price
21:47
as the gospel and they say well nothing works in this market so screw it I guess this isn’t for me well you know you part
21:54
of your job analyzing deals in your buy box is to calculate what you can afford to offer and then this is the biggest
22:02
bottleneck in my opinion for most people is that they don’t actually make offers they spend so much time hypothesizing
22:08
and thinking and analyzing and then they don’t actually make any offers and then they wonder why they don’t get any deals
22:14
so this is where like as a coach when I’m working with people this is where I apply that gentle encouragement and
22:20
pressure and say okay you’ve already defined what you’re looking for you’ve already built the team you’ve already picked the market you’ve already gotten
22:27
good a deal analysis if you can’t come back to me in you know a week or two weeks and have started making offers
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then all this work is kind of for nothing right so that’s one big point and step seven is build in your
22:39
operational systems before you close so that’s whether or not you have a property manager if you self-manage or
22:45
if you use a property manager what are your ongoing responsibilities and how you’re going to kind of oversee that and
22:51
again that’s all in the lens of in my case I work full-time so this can’t be something that takes five hours a week
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you know um it needs to be something that could be run not completely passively because I don’t think that exists but at least something that can
23:04
have some leverage on my time so I’ll stop there that’s kind of the seven step process that I outline based on my
23:10
experience but I’d love your reaction to any or all on that no no I think I agree I was looking at like I you know jotted
23:16
out my like my kind of top five list in terms of just like met new brand new investors and I think there’s a lot of crossover between mine and what you said
23:24
um a lot of what you get into I think also Dove Tales into like I guess what I did kind of Define is like tips and tricks or like hacks or you know
23:31
mistakes to avoid but yeah no lot a lot a lot of a lot of crossover there in particular the the number especially
23:38
when you’re first starting out like there’s a lot of people I think that start following advice on YouTube and there’s a lot of really I I
23:45
don’t want to call it bad advice but it’s just not good advice for people that are starting out and so like when
23:51
you talked about you like the number of times I’ve been in a conversation with somebody who you know maybe like they they have like like I have a friend who
23:57
has a like a single family rental and that’s all he’s got he’s got one door and you know going through what
24:03
I’ve gone through over the last three years I’m just like when I sit down and talk to him I just read like oh wow like this guy really like doesn’t understand
24:10
what he’s doing but he’ll be like yeah you know I was thinking about buying a you know a mobile home park or I was thinking about buying this like 16 unit
24:16
property down and you just realize like he has absolutely no business doing that he has no idea how to kind of get into it he’d probably just I don’t I don’t
24:23
know if he would like lose everything but it would just cost him an insane amount of money and that’s you know assuming he can even Finance the thing
24:29
initially but people just get excited because they’re watching these like shiny objects on social media and they
24:34
assume like oh that’s the thing I can like I can go mimic that and it’s just not a good it’s just not a good way to
24:40
do it but yeah probably agree with everything on the list a lot of the things I would say like on your for
24:45
somebody that’s starting out it’s I don’t feel like there’s any book you can go read or even any system that’s going
24:50
to like really prepare you for that first property and all the stuff that’s going to happen like it’s really
24:55
difficult to preemptively go out and interview Property Management firms have them take you seriously and actually
25:01
have some idea of like these people know what they’re doing or don’t if you don’t have some sense of what it’s like to if
25:06
you haven’t like managed your own property for a while or just dealt with a difficult property manager or
25:11
something so a lot of the time like you know like they for like for your step with building the team like I feel like people are kind of firing blind a lot of
25:17
the time when they first start out like maybe they think they understand what a good property manager is but if they’ve never dealt with one if they haven’t had
25:22
to deal with the monthly statements they haven’t had to manage them through some difficult problems at a property like they just have NOA
25:29
idea or even more than that you know you can end up it’s easy to end up I think in a situation where like maybe your
25:34
property is like got a bunch of problems but they’re just not being dealt with you don’t know that the property manager doesn’t know that so from your
25:40
perspective you’re like hey I get this money every month everything’s fine but you don’t find out until three years then that you’ve actually got a pretty awful property manager and they haven’t
25:46
taken care of things you know what I mean 100% And especially if you’re remote I mean you’re largely taking
25:52
people’s word for the work that they’re doing unless you have somebody on the ground or somebody a trusted friend or
25:59
or like I said that other investor who can provide that check and balance and a little bit of oversight maybe they’ll
26:05
drive by your property you know on an average winter day to see if it’s over I totally agree that you know
26:12
you’re kind of just taking people’s word for it if you know if you’re especially if you’re remote you you you had to
26:18
install some sort of oversight or system to be able to understand if the work is actually getting done and if you’re a
26:25
newer investor especially I think property managers unfortunately some of
26:30
them are are willing to kind of take advantage of that naivity and and like I think you said it earlier people will
26:37
come in and a very rose-colored glasses like assuming everything will work out
26:43
perfectly and therefore they’re like utterly unprepared to face adversity when it happens now I say that not to
26:50
scare anybody but it’s really it’s kind of a matter of like when not if like
26:56
things will happen right and if you budget properly and you set your expectations properly those things
27:04
nothing is going to stop those moments from sucking like they don’t feel good when you have a big expense come across
27:10
or you have to deal with an eviction or something like that but if you’re kind of building your business right and
27:16
you’re and you’re teaming up with the right people then you can weather those things knowing that you’ve kind of
27:22
planned for it and there’s always things that are unexpected one of my favorite
27:27
quotes that I heard it in the psychology of money by Morgan howel but I believe the quote originated from somebody else
27:33
because risk is what’s left when you think you’ve thought of everything and so I think a lot of people you know they
27:40
hit analysis paralysis because they’re just trying to anticipate every possible downside scenario that could come up and
27:47
inevitably when you do that a you don’t take action and B it’s the thing that
27:53
you didn’t think of that ends up happening right so it’s kind of like at some point you have to just take get off
27:59
the sideline and take some sort of action and trust that you will figure it out by leveraging the resources
28:05
available through your network through the internet through the communities you’re a part of I mean X is a great
28:11
example now of you know I’ve met some incredible investors that share openly about their experiences both good and
28:17
bad and even by virtue of this space right like we just spun this conversation up to share some of our
28:23
perspective there’s stuff like this happening all the time oh no it’s huge yeah it makes a huge difference
28:29
yeah and so yeah I totally agree with with you know that as kind of a a risk
28:36
one thing though you know to to kind of put a better spin on it right is
28:41
communities I don’t think you need to pay for you know crazy expensive mentorships or communities and stuff to
28:47
be successful I don’t think that at all but I do believe that there are I
28:53
wouldn’t even call them shortcuts but when you do join a community especially one that has
28:58
some level of barrier to entry like there’s a there’s a ton of free communities that have great value but
29:04
you have to S through a lot of noise when you do join something like a paid Community or a mentorship typically the
29:10
people that are in there are a bit more serious and committed and so what I’ve noticed as a participant in several
29:17
different communities is that I stopped making as many mistakes when I put myself in rooms around other people who
29:25
are you know at that five Plus Rental like once I got past my first couple
29:31
deals I wanted to be around people that had you know 8 to 10 so I could see like
29:36
okay what’s what is the difference in the mindset of somebody buying their first run all versus somebody who’s
29:41
scaling and trying to do it responsibly because there is kind of a difference I mean you would know especially with kind
29:47
of what how you outlined your story you had two in the first year and then by the third year you or no sorry in 2023
29:55
you bought 12 12 doors total and that’s right the the mindset and the operational challenges that come with
30:01
scaling that quickly I mean you have to kind of change your identity as an investor in order to rise into that
30:07
moment so point I’m trying to make is just for sure yeah communities and stuff so go ahead sir I was going to say yeah
30:14
to to kind of like harp on the the mindset thing like if you don’t want to change it’s going to be really really
30:20
difficult you know like you mentioned like hey like you know outline why you want to do this and make sure that’s there and I would just say like the one
30:26
thing that like you know it’s like my first thing was just sort of like make sure you’re willing to like if you’re not in a state where you’re already like
30:33
if you’re not regularly spending less than you make and you don’t have a lot of extra like invest in whatever whether it’s real estate or not it’s like
30:39
definitely don’t start like first get yourself to that point just so that you can like prepare properly and so that
30:46
you know it’s not necessarily like you’re not you’re not waiting on that rental income from like the first three months just cuz like there’s going to be
30:52
so many different expenses and so many things that come up right so if you’re not ready to just actively adapt and
30:59
learn constantly cuz like those first two properties in particular even for me you know I was like I you know I bought two single family homes when I started
31:05
because that felt familiar and then as you know you know I got like at that point when I bought those the idea of
31:11
buying a duplex or anything more dense was terrifying and then after i’ had those
31:16
for about a year though suddenly like you know the these other these other more dense properties didn’t feel so
31:22
scary and like when I bought that sixplex in the middle of 2024 that was a big kind of stress for me just like
31:28
going there and just seeing you like okay there’s these six units are all packed in here it was you know it’s just a simple six unit property but at the
31:34
time that was terrifying now that seems easy but as you kind of go through that
31:39
like to your point you know like I I definitely don’t want to take my my earlier comments as like saying like don’t you know don’t pay attention to
31:45
the social Comm these these social communities all these people you have online there’s a lot of really valuable stuff there but I’m just you know it’s
31:51
very easy to get distracted and so it’s like you’d be skeptical constantly I guess is my advice on that
31:57
yeah for sure but also to the point you just made right that your vision evolved your comfort level evolved as you like
32:04
it happened organically right if you if the first property you bought was a six bikes there’s nothing saying that you
32:09
couldn’t be successful but there’s I would be willing to bet that you were
32:15
more comfortable buying six plags after already owning you know six other doors
32:20
oh for sure and I mean yeah like I mean with density like one of my like the tips or tricks that I have here is that if you’re going to go more dense just um
32:27
make sure you know what you’re doing because if you don’t all the mistakes that you make just multiply that by the
32:32
density yeah I’d rather make my mistakes when the stakes are a bit lower and and
32:38
the the ability to kind of recover and bounce back is easier when you have a smaller portfolio and you’re still kind
32:43
of learning you know one thing I think you you mentioned right that you started and you kind of only had the one was it
32:50
a friend or a family member that they had the the three reynals yeah it was a it was a it was a friend that had four
32:56
they had four Reynolds yeah so you know my parents were investors and still are they started investing in the early
33:02
2000s and for the first five rentals that we bought they were pretty much the only other investors we talked to and
33:09
they never heard of Bigger Pockets they never were in any communities they never hung out with any other investors they
33:15
did very well in their own right they’re very handy they self-managed I learned a ton from them but I realized over time
33:23
that by only exposing myself to that single perspective while I was building out the foundation with my wife you know
33:29
we were limiting ourselves and certainly like made some avoidable mistakes just by not leveraging the tools that are
33:36
readily available uh on the internet you know whe and of course you have to always take advice that you get on the
33:42
internet with the cre is solved but I do think that we kind of woke up to the
33:48
idea that there is an abundance of information and perspective and as long
33:53
as you put that through the filter of what works in your own strategy you can stand to gain a lot
33:59
from hearing different perspectives like we just there are certain things we just didn’t even consider like my parents
34:05
they only briefly used the property manager for the 25 years they’ve been investing they’ve only briefly used the
34:11
property manager for a couple years otherwise they defaulted to self-managing so we defaulted to self-managing yeah on that topic in
34:18
particular that was just the how like so when you would you started out self-managing because of like their
34:23
advice sounds like what you’re saying well less about their advice and we just like we didn’t even really just never
34:30
even considered it yeah we just never really assumed to do it now our situation was a little different because
34:35
when we started out we were living in downtown Las Vegas and we bought our first rental a mile away from our house
34:42
so it felt like hey we can we can figure it out it was it was newly reconstructed from the ground up it was in good
34:48
shape the first ourselves yeah like I am not handy at all I barely like hanging
34:54
pictures on my wall so it’s not like I was over there fixing stuff but it felt manageable because it was so
35:01
close so I think there was a comfort level that we established with the tenants and and then we bought two more rentals in Vegas and because they were
35:08
local for whatever reason that made us feel more comfortable I have come to challenge that assumption I don’t believe that that makes as big of a
35:14
difference as people think right whether it’s you know in your same city or not but but yeah we self-managed and then
35:19
when we when we moved to Washington it was in the middle of Co it was like June
35:24
2020 and bringing on a property manager I don’t know it felt like we already had
35:29
the relationships with our tenants we already had the infrastructure kind of enjoyed it frankly having direct
35:35
relationships with the tenants managing like I knew how to manage all the lease and rent collection and it felt like it
35:42
wasn’t the right time to turn that over and then once we got up to Washington and we were able to run it for five six
35:49
months without any major issues we basically just continued to ride that
35:55
train now we have just two months ago we brought in property manager in Las Vegas
36:01
but that was after five and a half years of self-managing that’s impressive that you’re able to do it that long remotely because that’s I think that’s difficult
36:07
to do but I’m curious to see like you especially you mentioned your parents kind of used them briefly and that it
36:12
never sort of ended your mind like most of the folks that I’ve talked to that have like maybe just a handful of
36:18
rentals especially if they’ve ended up in a place where they’re just managing them by on their own like like you like
36:24
you and your wife were they all have like a property management Horror Story where it’s like they tried it at one point like with one of their properties
36:30
or two of them and then just something went horribly wrong and they’re just like all right that’s not for me and then so they just they never try it
36:36
again yeah I’m not one of those yeah I mean I I definitely have those just like one of the things that became clear to
36:42
me kind of early on was if I wanted to expand I needed to get really good at identifying an effective property
36:47
manager and that’s not easy to do yeah and and so you know to the point of this conversation getting started in
36:55
real estate and you know you made a couple comments earlier that sometimes when you’re you’re new and you’re interviewing a property manager
37:01
you don’t necessarily know what to listen for in their responses you might have a list of questions that you’re going to read down and and ask right you
37:07
can download stuff from Bigger Pockets right a bunch of different people that have those kind of interview check list
37:14
but if you can’t kind of sniff out or have a have a BS detector sometimes you
37:20
can get taken advantage of right I think that’s the stake for sure which is we
37:26
kind of like we ask we ask asked the right questions but we heard what we wanted to hear instead of really like
37:32
double clicking on certain things that maybe sounded like they weren’t 100% what they should be and you know we got
37:39
ourselves in a bit of trouble in the first the first property we lot in Iowa because we interviewed the the manager
37:46
and they were telling us all the right stuff but it it turned out that they were basically just lying to our faces
37:52
and tldr version is it we closed on that property in January
37:58
in Iowa which is the middle of a very cold winter turns out they they never
38:03
turned on the gas in the property it sitting in 37 degrees for almost seven
38:09
weeks and it also went without any showings they said we could get you know
38:16
they promised us we could get $300 a month higher than what the comps backed up but they were very insistent about it
38:22
right they just salt on the wound they they weren’t even doing Shillings they just had a lock box and were weren’t any
38:28
showings but they were going to just let people in and so oh that’s brutal you’re describing like I think every like
38:33
potential or like every new landlord’s nightmare I mean well I think like it’s
38:39
something that people need to keep in mind when they’re dealing with these property managers is it’s a volume game for the property manager and there’s
38:45
like a balance in there where it’s like mean it’s easy for them that like they they make more money the more volume they take on so usually like they’ll be
38:51
whether it’s you know just like a onep person shop or like it’s rare for it to be like if it’s a really big
38:56
professional operation they’re probably not willing to deal with a smaller with a you know with a smaller scale landlord that only has a couple of
39:02
units and so they spend most of their days though you know they’re dealing with a lot of volume they have a lot of
39:07
investors and they’ve tuned in like how to deal with both in you know ten they they’re really good at dealing with
39:12
tenants generally but they’re also really good at dealing with whatever drama comes out of the you know their investor community so when you go and
39:19
sit down and talk to them especially if you don’t know any better like there’s a thousand little things that are like flagging to them about who you are what
39:25
you know what you don’t know and what they can take advantage of and that unfortunately all comes into play so they’ll just like they they they
39:31
can almost you know like for talking to you for a couple minutes they know exactly what to say they know exactly
39:36
how to say it you know they know how to kind of like perfectly put you at ease and then you hand your property over and like suddenly you’re just like you you
39:42
know they’re not answering calls or not taking care of problems you find out that they maybe never listed it or didn’t list it at the price that they
39:48
said so it can get really it can get really ugly if you don’t figure out how to stay on top of it for sure and I
39:54
think that’s where it’s important to kind of understand like what potential layers of oversight you can have even if
39:59
you hire a full stop property manager right like it’s perfectly appropriate for you to ask them and try and really
40:06
get an understanding what is their marketing plan to fill vacancies what is their overall vacancy rate for the units
40:12
that they manage like what how do they treat tenants how do they what’s their kind of standard operating procedures
40:20
around response times like what are their business hours what happens in emergencies and then to understand that
40:26
like really making sure that that’s actually what’s happening right and and do report back one other point of view I
40:33
developed over time was even if we have a full stop property manager we want to have some direct contact even if it’s
40:41
just introducing ourselves to the tenants because one situation we had was
40:46
we had a property manager we fired the one that I just described earlier that we brought on another one at one point
40:52
and he was telling us that he was doing a bunch of stuff and he wasn’t and our tenants f figured out how to randomly
40:58
they tried to get in touch with my wife by sending her like 50 cents on venmill with a big long message in the payment
41:06
oh wow and because they didn’t have a direct line of communication with us and like it turns out that the property
41:12
manager wasn’t doing anything he was telling us and and then it became this game of he sh he said she said and it
41:19
spiraled kind of out of control and obviously again that’s kind of another property manager nightmare story because
41:26
and you know we ended up having to fire too but the the Fallout of kind of that
41:31
neglect and mishandling of the tenant situation it was a challenging tenant too so like our trust was completely
41:38
destroyed with that tenant and it was a bumpy six months after that before she
41:44
eventually moved out that we were self-managing it and so now you know we have a pretty Firm Stance that we’re
41:50
going to at least establish contact and say hey we are the owners of this property just want to reach out and introduce ourselves you know we have X
41:58
Property Management managing it you’re in great hands you know we we do want this to be a great environment for you
42:04
to live in and we care about keeping on top of things so please make sure you escalate any maintenance related issues
42:10
or things that come up and then on the other side of that because of course when you when you give
42:16
people an invitation to escalate anything they certainly will right it’ll start be anything and everything but
42:23
especially they start trying to play you off of the the property manager if they don’t like the property manager’s doing or you know they asked for something and
42:30
the property manager said no or something like that yeah exactly so I’m I think it’s like establishing that kind
42:36
of courteous relationship where it’s like hey we may be far away but like
42:41
we’re people too we have kids we have you know jobs like we understand kind of
42:46
what it’s like to be out in the world and and and we do care about the quality of our homes and the quality of the
42:53
living conditions that you know we’re providing you so it’s there’s that empathetic connection which is totally
42:58
genuine not just talking out of our ass right something we care about coupled with you know really having good strong
43:06
communication with the property managers because I think if property managers know that you’re not paying any
43:11
attention they will treat your property differently the flip side of that though is that if you are a pain in their ass
43:17
and and you become a problem for a property manager especially if you only have one or two properties you know that
43:24
can backfire on you too so you got to really no yeah for sure cck spots yeah
43:29
but I think like a big part of my life right now is managing property managers and that’s just like for me I
43:34
just treat them like employees and just assume that like well like I think there’s a misconception too
43:40
that just like the property manager is just going to handle everything and you’re not going to have to worry about anything from your property like it’s going to turn into like you know like a
43:46
CD or something for you where you just get a payment most of the time it’s like they’re not staying you know really on
43:51
top of like preventive maintenance they’re basically only doing the minimum they’re not doing regular inspections of the property or only when somebody moves
43:58
in or out but if you’ve got like a good property in a decent state if you’re not staying on top of them there can be like months sometimes that go by before you
44:03
know with between when they even stop by and take a look at it or look at the building you know do a walkr of it walk
44:09
around just see what’s going on but if you’re if you if you have also
44:14
like a relationship with them and you stay on top of them and they understand that like you’re engaged you’re engaged with the property like you’re not just
44:20
completely offloading it to them it’s it’s kind like with like with a contractor right like an unsupervised contractor will do unsupervised work if
44:27
they don’t think you’re going to check they’re going to get a very different you know result than if they know you’re going to show up and say something if
44:32
there’s a problem yeah for sure I mean I think I think one of the most dangerous words in
44:40
the real estate investing world is is the PW passive oh yeah because people like you said they just assume it’s
44:46
going to be some sort of monthly cash flow mailbox money printing machine and
44:53
you know you can get it to pretty darn close to passive but it requires some some upfront work that’s why I said you
44:59
know in my little seven step process install operational systems before you close that doesn’t necessarily mean that
45:05
you’re self-managing it just means like you said that you you have a process to manage your managers you have some sort
45:11
of you know Bird’s eyed view of your portfolio and how it’s performing you stay on top of your books or you have a
45:18
service or software that does it for you a lot of this stuff can be automated and really trimmed down to where it takes
45:25
you know 10 to 15 minutes instead of hours and you
45:31
know just so that anybody can find a small chck of time to to take care of an asset that’s worth potentially hundreds
45:37
of thousands of dollars and if you do that if you do that little bit of work and and build it right up front then it
45:43
can be much closer to passive but if you just assume from day one it’s going to be passive and you don’t do any of that upfront work at some point that bill is
45:50
going to come do both finally and and emotionally and it’s going to be ugly
45:55
well it’s also I think really like one of the things for me you know I came from investing in stocks and and bonds for you know for decades and so I’ve
46:03
learned to look at real estate in kind of a like a months and years perspective and that if I get hung up on what’s
46:09
happening in any given week or something like that or actually even even months maybe quarters and years is a better way
46:15
to describe it but it’s like try to look at like okay how did this quarter go as opposed to like what’s happening in any
46:20
given month just cuz like yeah like it’s a lot of Peaks and valleys at least for me where it’s almost it feels like
46:26
there’s just a bunch of messes and that’s taking a bunch of my time or everything’s just going smoothly I don’t
46:33
have any trouble like you know do I have like like in month to month that can just
46:38
flip where it’s just like all of a sudden for whatever reason like you know like the garage door springs on three on
46:44
three there’s three or four garage door springs that for whatever reason all go out at the same time and then at the same time there’s like some backyard
46:49
issue like you know like the flooding or something like that or and then like in another one like the toilet Brokers it
46:55
it’ll all just but it like that’ll always just happen at once and if I get hung up on like okay like the the
47:00
returns for the month got shot because of that and like I get really really upset but if I take a step back and just
47:06
say let me look at this over the like the course of a quarter or over the course of a year it ends up with a it’s a very very different perspective and a
47:12
very different kind of return so anytime I get hung up or when I get into those like dark spots that’s kind of one of
47:18
the things I just try to remind myself that like okay let me like take a step out because every time I take a step out like the returns are great and it’s a
47:25
really good business my little catchphrase for that is you know when in doubt zoom out right if you
47:31
know if you really don’t believe in the strategy then you either probably I mean there there’s a number of different
47:36
things that could be going wrong right like you could have a leaky operational Foundation you could have bad teammates
47:42
and all that stuff or you could be perhaps like you said just feeding it in twoo short term of a lens when the real
47:48
power of this strategy plays out over decades right a minimum years right unless you’re doing something more
47:53
active like flips but you know one you’re hitting on something that I also am very passionate about which is when
48:00
people refer to cash flow or they think about kind of their their profits a lot
48:05
of people use the term cash flow and they’re talking about the rent they collected minus the mortgage and they’re
48:11
not really factoring in you know acrs from basically the the prevailing theory
48:17
is that if if there was no maintenance this month then that’s just pure profit well there’s stuff that comes due over
48:23
time right and I think one of the the biggest kind of root key mistakes is to
48:29
not budget properly for those and I’ve actually seen like even some TurnKey providers and companies that’ll they’ll
48:36
sell houses that have been recently remodeled by them and they’ll say you
48:41
know this has a cash on cash return of 8% but they have a 0% acral zero dollar
48:48
you know line item for maintenance and CB backs and they say well you don’t need that because we just fixed everything everything’s fine oh yeah and
48:54
like hey we just remodeled it right so everything’s perfect you’re not going to have to repair anything yeah exactly and
48:59
so the way I think about cash flow is I always at a minimum first of all I think anytime somebody presents a deal to you
49:06
always suggest underwriting it yourself with your own assumptions and your own figures and see if it it shakes out the
49:13
scene I have yet to encounter somebody who’s pitched me a deal where you know their numbers are
49:19
more conservative than the ones I use and so that 8% cash on cash that this TurnKey company you know says but they
49:26
don’t have any maintenance or capex budget once you add in some sort of budget for future expenses all of a
49:32
sudden that’s a 3% and it’s no longer a big deal right so I think that’s one of the things that I’m very very adamant
49:39
about instilling and when I talk about cash flow I’m I’m always trying to do it net cash flow because I do think that
49:46
that’s a dangerous if you just Bank all of that money and you go either spend it or take it as a owner draw and then you
49:53
have to replace a furnace and then you’re going back into your personal savings and contributing it back to your
49:59
business to do that that stings but if you’ve been acre it kind of tracking the age of your Mechanicals you know you
50:05
can’t predict everything but you certainly can you can Bank on on Father time taking its toll on your
50:13
appliances yeah my my version of that that like it’s like two different principles for me is like one don’t be
50:19
optimistic don’t assume that you’re going to be able to get just these really idealistic rents don’t assume that things are just going to work it’s
50:24
going to whe whether it’s newly remodeled or not don’t assume that you’re not going to have problems don’t assume that they’re like whatever the
50:29
expenses that you’re calculating assume that they’re going to be way higher and then the the second part of that is just
50:35
verify everything especially as part of a deal like the worst thing you can do is listen to what a realtor says and just say like all right well they told
50:40
me it’s an 8% so I’m good because usually the math that they’re using is is Warped at best you
50:47
know it’s just designed to display like to put forward like the best possible lens on the property that they
50:54
can and without you know legally getting into some kind of trouble for for lying
50:59
and so like I’ve seen all sorts of you know like they they’ll like they’ll leave Property Management out of it they’ll assume that the maintenance is
51:04
zero they’ll like even though they have bills for like all the like the utilities for the past year they’ll they’ll like cut that in half and say
51:10
like well with these you know if you if you change these bigots and change these other things then those aren’t going to be as high and so like for me I’ve just like
51:18
anytime I go into a deal now I just I just assume everything that I’m being told is probably not true like like with
51:23
the possible exception of like a rent roll and that I need to verify everything so if you know if they hey
51:28
like like the realtor says Hey the the roof was replaced 3 years ago or four years ago so no worries like first thing I do is call the roofer and get him out
51:35
there and have him inspect that I just check everything and assume that like it’s just an industry where I feel like
51:41
everybody’s kind of incentivized to hide things you know if they if they think
51:46
that they can legally get away with it without getting into trouble like they’ll just they just won’t say it that they won’t tell you
51:52
anything yeah their incentive right for a for more or less any real estate
51:57
professional is to have a higher volume of transactions that’s right that’s usually where most real estate
52:04
professionals get paid and then for a property manager you know they’re I think actually I trust I generally trust
52:11
at least good property manager opinions more because they don’t want to take on units that have problems right and so I
52:18
think anytime you can have a property manager walk a property that you’re considering you know you kind of you
52:24
collect all these perspectives so you haveen you know typically I I don’t wave inspections I know that that’s a way to
52:31
make competitive offers but especially if you’re new I don’t think skipping an inspection makes a lot of sense so you
52:36
cre an inspection you have your agent hopefully you have a good agent that you feel like you can trust you get their
52:42
perspective on what needs to be done you get the property manager’s perspective on hey you know what what needs to
52:48
happen to make this a compelling rental that’s going to be durable and you know last as long as possible and you collect
52:55
those different perspectives from people who have a different lenss that they think of the property and then of course
53:01
you overlay that with your own perspective as an investor and I think it’s the collection of all of that that
53:06
makes an informed decision not just taking your agent’s word for it like you said earlier because the agent you have
53:12
you have to always question the underlying incentive even if you trust them and and there are also certain things that agents won’t say sometimes
53:20
legally like you said there’s there well yeah the the the requirements for the state like I mean if you’re dealing with
53:25
a like the situation you can be in in terms of an age of being honest is usually a single family home because
53:30
there’s more scrutiny and legal requirement like especially in say State like Washington but even in Arizona to
53:36
just for that like if there’s anything that you leave out you can get in a lot of trouble the minute you move beyond
53:41
that into anything that’s categorized as multif family though the rules change quite a bit and so they can be a lot
53:47
more unscrupulous in terms of like you know dat information that whether they know it or not like information that
53:52
they leave out because it’s generally assumed that if you’re not if it’s anything other than you know single family that you have some idea what
53:59
you’re doing you’re more Savvy and that you’re going to go through all jump through all the Hoops that you or you have some idea of all the Hoops you need
54:04
to jump through that makes sense that’s something that I learned recently because I initially especially the first
54:11
couple duplexes that I bought I was fortunate then they were newer so I didn’t get into trouble but I I found out later that the
54:17
same they don’t even though like it’s t like the the disclosure requirement is still the same it’s nowhere near as
54:24
enforced there and so like if you reported to the Department licensing they have a like in Washington they have just kind of like a hey like well you
54:29
should have known better kind of reaction to it as opposed to being willing to like dig in and
54:34
really do something about it but with single family homes they’ll absolutely like take somebody to the cleaners yeah no doubt but with that
54:42
said I know we’ve we’ve kind of um spent a good portion of this conversation talking about some of the things to look
54:47
out for kind of like protecting the downside but like what what would you say are some of the key takeaways that
54:54
can equip an investor who Maybe doesn’t have a strong foundational knowledge base to kind of show up in these
55:02
conversations in a way that can protect themselves so you know like like like I was saying earlier you can ask all the
55:08
right questions but if you don’t know how to interpret the answers it could be difficult like what are what are some of the best way someone can fortify
55:13
themselves from that risk definitely like reading and sorry I’ve got my dogs working here in the background hopefully
55:19
that’s not too annoying let me put my heads set on I’ll give my quick take on it while he’s doing that but you know I
55:25
think the community whether it’s a free community a paid Community coaches mentors and by the way
55:31
not all coaches are people that you necessarily have to pay a lot of people a lot of coaches and mentors put out
55:38
content right so you can kind of get this proxy coaching just by being exposed to their ideas and hearing those
55:44
perspectives like I was saying a bit earlier you know if you over index and put all your weight on one or two people
55:51
that are your friends maybe they’re Real Estate Investors but they might not have you know that kind of diverse broad
55:57
perspective that can be risky but I think the more you expose yourself to different points of view and different
56:03
levels of experience that can har you to spot BS when it pops up and just show up
56:09
as a more credible investor but I definitely I want to hear your take too I will try and kind of take us out here
56:15
but I think in essence right like that’s one of the commonalities between both of our stories here is that we started very
56:23
much kind of Lone W figuring things out as we went we took imperfect action
56:28
that’s something I’m feel strongly about you can get caught in analysis process
56:34
very very easily and you know finding the bottlenecks and kind of massaging your way down that like some people
56:40
they’re great and they love spreadsheets and they’ll spend all the time in the world analyzing a deal but they’ll never pick up the phone and you know talk to
56:47
their agent or make any offers and so you know it’s pretty hard to get a deal done without making offers and so I
56:55
think that you taking action making offers getting feedback from the open market understanding talking to
57:01
different property managers agents investors Etc that’s the best way to get started in my opinion it’s it’s not some
57:08
perfect sequential list of tasks it’s just exposing yourself I think I pretty much agree with all of that yeah like
57:15
the I like I mean I I would definitely read books watch videos like take whatever training you can or the time
57:20
allows but just also understand that there’s really nothing that’s going to substitute for giving just directly
57:26
involved and starting to dig around in deals and also like I think one of the things that plagued me early on that
57:32
took me a while to figure out was that it it’s going to take a lot of your time and that most of the deals aren’t going
57:37
to work out like initially it felt like I couldn’t find anything that was going to you know cash flow and like you know
57:43
I would I would do I would analyze I 20 30 properties and feel like I’d really put in a ton of work like that that was
57:48
like a you know meaningful amount and then I realized later that it’s like okay that number needs to be in the hundreds before I’m probably going to
57:54
find something that that I really really like and then even beyond that like once you get involved in a deal this kind of
57:59
goes back to the don’t be optimistic thing I was talking about before but just at any given point if things aren’t
58:04
lining up just walk away I feel like when people are like especially if you know you’ve got some cash together and
58:09
you’re getting ready to try and dive in and buy your first property like you’re an any investor I feel like is inherently optimistic and they’ve got
58:17
that kind of like well I’m going to do whatever you know needs to be done here to make this work and so as you’re doing that you dig in on a property you start
58:23
running into problems you find out there’s more issues than you realize the prices is maybe too high the rents aren’t where you maybe thought they were
58:29
there’s a lot more maintenance going on and as that stuff tacks on stacks on it’s really easy to just try to be
58:35
optimistic about it and say like oh I’ll just figure that out okay well I can I can still make this work as opposed to
58:40
just saying like hey um I’m willing to walk away and you know that might mean you
58:46
know letting go of some money or letting go of things but it’s just like you’ll learn so much just through that process of like engaging on a deal and you know
58:53
digging in and like you know calling the agents finding out what’s going on with the property doing some basic analysis
58:59
of it trying to figure out if like the like using whatever formula you’re using whether or not it you know it’s going to meet your investing criteria maybe
59:05
getting that under contract getting an inspection going all of those things as long as you’re really digging in are
59:10
going to just teach you a ton about the overall process but if you’re if you just if you
59:15
just get so fixated on like okay like you think like this property is just the one property and there’s not going to be another one it’s really really easy to
59:23
make big mistakes and then actually like learn even less so just getting him that just getting him the habit of like whether it’s like
59:29
talking to agents you know going out and analyzing the properties yourself maybe actually getting things under contract like for
59:35
me I at this point you know like this past year I probably like I my close rate is like maybe one in 10 versus like things that I’ll put
59:42
under contract just to kind of get my head wrapped around the property get access to all the documents see what’s going on versus when I actually close
59:49
but early on it felt like such a big deal and such a huge time commitment to just get something under contract that I
59:55
was very scared so just getting over the sooner you can get over all of that stuff and realize
1:00:00
that just you know like the bigger players they’re all just constantly bouncing in and out of deals like they just don’t care at all like they’ll put
1:00:06
something under contract like a week later they’ll do they’ll be like one little thing they don’t like about it and then they’ll just they’ll just pull
1:00:11
out it’s part of due diligence you know what I mean 100% And I think it’s putting yourself in a room whether that’s
1:00:18
literal or or metaphorical with people who are taking action and and making
1:00:24
offers so that it doesn’t Fe feel so abnormal if you’re in a room with your your high school friends who may be
1:00:30
awesome people but they have no interest in investing and they’ve never you know they don’t think about this stuff and they’re not making opers you know you’re
1:00:37
not going to probably gravitate towards that same behavior but if you’re in a room full of Real Estate Investors or a
1:00:42
free community or a group or whatever it may be and everyone around you is is analyzing deals and making offers then
1:00:49
you will probably be more likely to to emulate that behavior so I think yeah whatever it kind of takes to normalize
1:00:55
the behavior that will lead to good profitable deals and and good operations
1:01:00
you know that’s that’s kind of how you can bolster yourself and and give a toolkit I do have to I do have to wrap
1:01:06
up now I apologize but I really enjoyed this and I hope that we get to do it again soon because I I think we pulled
1:01:12
on quite a few different topics that we can easily be dive into on their own yeah for sure I completely agree like
1:01:17
thanks so much for taking the time to do this but also yeah like just to seeing the the breath of things that we covered I’m like man on any one of these things
1:01:24
we could probably just dive in for at least like like 30 to 60 Minutes on just but we touch like you know probably 10
1:01:29
of those different topics so I’ll definitely let’s let’s get another one of these set up we will do it and thank
1:01:34
you everyone who uh dialed in and listened awesome well thanks so much for the time around it was good to finally
1:01:40
meet you and thanks to all the other people for showing up thank you too man have a good weekend you too bye thank
1:01:45
you for making it to the end of today’s episode as you may know podcasts are very difficult to grow organically if
1:01:51
you’re getting value from today’s episode I’d deeply appreciate if you can take 30 seconds to leave my show fstar
1:01:57
rating and review this will go a long way to helping me reach more listeners just like you thank you so much in
1:02:02
advance